Why grandpa says inappropriate things

That's the title of a smug little piece of fluff that appeared the other day on the Newsweek.com site. It contains a little anecdote about an elderly gentleman who used the word "colored" to describe someone and it continues with a bigoted diatribe about how the "social security generation" are all a bunch of senile bigots and maybe it's because their brains are all rotted out at age 65 as everyone under 30 knows.

Older adults might be "more prejudiced than younger adults because they can no longer inhibit their unintentionally activated stereotypes.” is the quote from some Australian psychologist dredged up for the purpose. "Studies since the late 1990s have shown that older Americans tend to be more racist than younger people." That seems odd to me since the people who were shot in Mississippi, and hosed and gassed and beset by dogs - the people who had that dream, who spent years fighting against discrimination, segregation and for civil rights are all in the "social Security" generation.

Of course you'll recognize that this is a rigged argument and one based on a bigoted stereotype. I'm not for instance, her "grandpa" and resent being told about how I am, what I am and how I think, based on her preconceived, negative notions of her elders. The definition of racist here has nothing to do with belief or action but is about the use of "inappropriate" words and guess who gets to decide when we stop saying Afro-American and start saying African-American lest we grow hair on our palms and be called racists for it? Guess who gets to decide that Mark Twain was a racist because he used the language of his day accurately or that Dr. King was a racist for using the word Negro or that the NAACP are a bunch of bigots for using the phrase "colored People?" And the people who got shot at and gassed and hosed and torn up by dogs and cracker cops for civil rights from Selma to Chicago become racists - and worse - old racists with decaying brains.

Of course to believe this bullshit at all, one also has to disregard the self-evident prejudice of younger Americans of all races. If you don't like the way I talk, perhaps you have to make allowances for the fact that I have a better command of English than those who learned it yesterday and I know what I'm doing when I choose my words. You might want to remember that I'm old enough to be fed up with the petty condescending scorn of tongue clucking 20 year olds who don't remember segregation or Jim Crow and spend their days examining the entrails of words and sniffing each other's drawers for the odor of racism while exhibiting the most galling contempt for those who handed them their civil rights on a silver platter.

"The frontal lobes’ decline is not inevitable. To the contrary: aerobic exercise enhances their functioning among older adults." says Sharon Begley who is probably closer in years to crapping in diapers than I am. "Next time grandpa utters something out of “Birth of a Nation,” suggest mall walking." Next time Sharon writes this kind of crap, I would suggest keel hauling. Those barnacles can rip the smirk right off your face, ya know?

And next time Sharon is out like mall walking with like her friends, maybe like she'll like remember that "Grandpa" owns it and just might have her and her stereotype-soaked frontal lobes thrown out.

Crossposted to The Impolitic

General Pace or General Disgrace?

Oh hell, let Congress censure me, but I'm an American citizen and I don't work for the government and I have a right to call it the way I see it. I have absolutely no obligation to respect the opinions of people I consider to be enemies of freedom and particularly those people on the public payroll who insist they work for an invisible entity not the taxpayers. I will not be bullied into worshipping authority or their authoritarian gods.

So when Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a Congressional hearing yesterday that our secular democracy should

"not through the law of the land, condone activity that, in my upbringing, is counter to God's law."

I have to call it disgraceful. I have to call his "upbringing" disgusting and I have to call the private and legal behavior of consenting adults none of his God damned business. There is no religious test or requirement for service in the armed forces and our troops are not required to bow to the beliefs of generals.

Screw Pace, screw his superstition, arrogance and his upbringing - and as for his god - screw him too.

Abandon all hope

Maybe one of the most horrible things about being in Hell is how similar it is to ordinary life. Maybe not knowing whether you're there or not is part of the punishment. It's a bright beautiful Florida morning, but something's wrong. I can't put my finger on it, but there are signs.

"What really gets me about airport security is the people they hire," says the woman across the table from me at the club. "I mean this woman has a dot on her forehead and they think I'm dangerous?"

The TV picture comes on, tuned to CNN's Lou Dobbs show: "Are the rich liberal elite betraying the country? more, after this. . ." In disgust, I switch to another news network. There must be some liberal media somewhere.

It's a commercial. The sleek exotic sports car sits alone in the showroom window as mommy vans and SUV's stuffed with rowdy rugrats and rugrat paraphernalia drive by. There are tears in the Lamborghini's headlights. Perhaps the 200 MPH exotic is dreaming of growing up to be a garbage truck. There are tears in my eyes too.

Maybe hell isn't a place where your momma has a 1/4 - 20 bolt through her lip and an anchor tattooed on her chest. Maybe hell isn't just a place where the world screams at you day and night to buy cheese fries and diet meals and sports water and sleeping pills and get out of debt scams and refinance your third mortgage to take the kids to Disneyland in a dump truck. Lobotom-On, apply directly to the forehead.

Maybe it's not just a madhouse where we hate American Hindus and Mexicans because Saudi Arabians blew up a building in New York. Maybe hell is a place where all this happens and people think it's normal.

Take these medals and. . .

I guess he has no immediate plans to run for office and that's good for Josh Gaines, a 27 year old Iraq war veteran who announced his plans today to mail his medals to Don Rumsfeld. Since he did nothing, says Gaines, to protect our country or to further the Global War on Terrorism, he doesn't deserve them.

“I’m going to give those back because I truly feel that I did not defend my nation and I did not help with the Global War on Terrorism. If anything, this conflict has bred more terrorism in the Middle East.”

Gaines, according to Army Times today spent a tour of duty in 2004 and 2005 guarding two military bases and issuing ammunition to soldiers. He never fired a weapon.

Of course one doesn't need a weapon to shoot oneself in the foot and the man has reason to resent the Army for having discharged him "less than honorably" for smoking cannabis after his return from Iraq; to help him, as he says, to sleep. It's a shame of course, since I essentially agree that demolishing Iraq and presiding over the smoking ruins isn't protecting the United States and is creating more hatred towards us than anything else, but his gesture will only provide fodder for the war lovers who would like to dismiss all dissenters as dopers, misfits and fringe elements. It would hardly take the Swift Boat Veterans a moment to sink him with their wake.

I realize that Americans need faith that we're always in the right and our wars are always part of the good fight and I know that all soldiers are heroes save those with the courage to question the ruler, but like at least one man who served with him said, I'm also proud of him and I wish there was less pride in submission and obedience in the ranks. I wish that more generals could give their real opinions and I wonder what Colin Powell has to smoke to sleep at night.

What, me worry?

Bush's speech before the UN today was all about human rights violations in Iran and Burma and Syria and Belarus, but unless my hearing is going, I didn't hear any concern for the crackdown on the opposition to Pervez Musharraf in recent days. Perhaps that was not a proper venue, but the concern remains over incidents like that in Islamabad yesterday where police broke up a protest outside the Supreme Court which is hearing a case challenging the constitutional validity of General Musharraf's dual role as president and chief Army officer. Leaders of two political parties have been jailed and are being held incommunicado.

It's disturbing enough that Condoleezza Rice expressed concern over the arrests in this nuclear armed country that contains both moderate and extreme elements including Taliban and perhaps Osama bin Laden. So unsettling indeed that our embassy has issued a statement calling the arrests "extremely disturbing and confusing for the friends of Pakistan," and calling on the government to free the detainees. Our moral superiority in such matters, of course is severely wounded by our denial of habeas corpus to perceived enemies at the whim of our own government and suspicion of election tampering in the last two presidential contests.

Accusations, explanations and justifications are flying around from various factions too numerous for me to comprehend and the concerns of the US have been rebuffed by Pakistan's Foreign Ministry:

"If the U.S. Embassy is confused, it would be well advised not to make such statements,"

said spokeswoman Tasneem Aslam. That doesn't do much to make me feel better and I'm sure it makes Dr. Rice feel as ineffectual as she is.

Dictator and treader upon human rights that Musharraf may be, and possibly worthy as some of his opposition may also be, there are worse who would like to depose him and al Qaeda in Pakistan is a far less dubious reality than al Qaeda in Iraq. Will his attempt to stifle opposition play into the hands of the worst of that opposition? Pakistan's Daily Times worries about it and who's to blame the rest of us that understand even less of this complex and fragile situation from worrying? The only thing that will help me sleep tonight is knowing that George Bush and his administration are on duty.

Cross posted at The Impolitic

What is truth, part III

Nothing is true, all things are permitted

-dubiously attributed to Hassan bin Sabbah - but who knows?

____

"There's nothing known as absolute," said Iranian president Ahmadinejad. That's an uncharacteristic statement for a religious man, but quite characteristic for someone trying to eat his words without swallowing them. It all depends on what "thing" means and what knowledge means and what absolute means you see -- and if you're adept at that sort of rebarbate rhetoric you're adept at saying you didn't have sex with that woman or that Hitler didn't kill all those Jews or that there are no homosexuals in Iran without leaving enough of a handle for anyone to call you to account for the apparent ambiguity.

Insinuating that the Jury is still out on something as massively documented as the Nazi genocide by talking about the rights of "Scholars" is a ploy all too reminiscent of Bush's assertion that the jury was still out on the equally massively documented subject of evolution. Neither jury exists. There is really no Debate concerning geology or cosmology or any number of things that people want to deny by insinuating one. There is not much of a debate about who hired the hijackers in 2001 and one has to suspect the motives for insinuating that perhaps it was the same "Columbian drug lords" who slashed Mrs. Simpson to pieces. I won't argue the inherent uncertainty in all things, nor would Doctor Heisenberg, but I will suggest that some things are close enough. There are Homosexuals in Iran and I think the pictures of teenagers swinging from ropes are real.

Perhaps though, the undoubtedly embarrassed president was forced to offer something more like a debate than the snarky "it never happened" crap that's been attributed to him elsewhere.

"Granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?"

That's a debate and a stunning opening for further debate that may never have happened during a long distance propaganda battle.

Does the Ahmadinajad shuffle indicate that the man regrets his statements and is trying to wriggle around them while not antagonizing the supporters who were just fine with holocaust denial? I'd like to think so and I'm sure that like any politician, he has to please people he doesn't agree with. I would also like to think that he's being forthcoming when he says Iran doesn't need a nuclear weapon and thinks Israel should not be attacked militarily. But as he says: nothing is absolute and of all those things not absolute, trust is near the top of the list. There is in fact a debate about Iranian nuclear progress and its aims and there are contradictory assertions about its policy toward Israel and toward the US occupation of Iraq. That's a debate where all parties have a credibility problem and where we all desperately want and need to know the answers.

Unfortunately I doubt there will be any step toward dialog taken by our horseless cowboy but one can hope that nothing blows up until we - and perhaps they have another administration.

Flowers for Ahmadinejad

In Iran, the president isn't what a president is in the United States. Ahmedinijad isn't the alpha dog of Iran; that would be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mahmoud, with his mangy beard and 80's vintage polyester jacket looks more like a cab driver or someone who hustles bags at JFK on weekends for a few extra bucks. It even seems as though he's a comparative liberal back home on issues like women's rights, so it's not surprising that Iranians wonder why we pay so much attention to him.

He's good at what he does however and what he does is push American hot buttons to the same effect as kids tossing peanuts at the primate house until the apes get hysterical and start shrieking and tossing dung. He's an expert in rattling our cage. So just what do we do with Ahmadinejad when he gets here? We don't have the discipline to ignore him and he knows it. Do we let him talk? Do we let him visit the holy hole in the ground? Do we let him control the situation?

Libby at Newshoggers suggests that we arrange to have some half naked college girl lay a big smooch on old stubbleface and maybe blow his chance for paradise -- or maybe worse: a young man in a tight speedo. ( I would suggest red with sequins) Perhaps a toilet paper parade or mass moon-in would send him home without that trademark smirk, but I have little doubt that we will play along with his game by hooting and flinging banana peels and making him feel important.

To draft or not to draft

I keep running into conversations centering around ending the Iraq war by instituting a draft. Doesn't anyone remember Viet Nam? The kind of people who support wars without particular concern for the cause or effect also support obedience as a virtue. The draft creates the draft dodger and the draft dodger becomes an effective straw man to use against many forms of protest, disagreement or even rational discussion.

The sons of Senators will not be drawn into dubious battle, they will either find deferments or medical problems or will do supervised and fictionalized tours far from the fray, like George W. Bush. It will be your kid or mine or maybe you sent to Baghdad.

Certainly no amount of public protest and demonstration will soften the resolve of those who think in terms of hard and soft, tough and weak, since they admire George for ignoring the people who employ him. It doesn't seem all that long ago to me that we had countless people demonstrating against another brutal, pointless and probably illegal war: business leaders, veterans, clergymen and other pillars of the community, all of whom were nicely dismissed as hippie draft dodgers or "Peaceniks" simply because there was a draft.

This war won't end until we are rid of the Bush crime family and the old Nixonians and neocons they associate with. Until we learn not to jump to take up arms every time some dimwit beats the war drum; until we learn not to identify with the kind of people we customarily elect, we will be in the same position we are in now every few years as a new crop of patriotic fools arises. A draft won't change a thing.

I am not a lesbian

And neither is Hillary Clinton but what's said cannot be unsaid. In our modern world, any accusation will be believed by someone and any denial will make it worse for the accused.

There is a legendary tale about Lyndon Johnson in his early political career having "leaked" the story that an opponent had made a lifelong practice of carnal intercourse with the sows he kept on his farm. When told by an adviser that nobody would believe such a story, Johnson replied that it didn't matter, he just wanted to make the guy deny being a pig-F***er. Even if there is no evidence, one reporter after another will try to gain notoriety by asking if the rumor is true and thereby validate the hoax that there is in fact a rumor. The trick is old, but the audience is always young.

Mrs. Clinton has been studying under that great teacher of experience for a long time and is no stranger to the slinging of the slime. "People will say what they want to say," was the perfect answer and the complete truth and it avoided the dilemma of confirming by denial or confirming by refusal to comment. If the Meth-addled Ann can call John Edwards gay and get away with it, the GOP skunk works has little to lose and may have a few votes to gain by trying it on Clinton.

Cross posted at TheImpolitic

Just some thoughts

Nothing is really the new anything.

Every day the universe is unimaginably bigger than it was yesterday.

Nothing you buy or do or don't do is going to "save the planet."

No one has ever succeeded in bringing back the way it used to be.

Nobody gives a damn about your diet.

There are no synonyms.

Some day there will be no Republicans.

Bearing false witness

The real defining battle with religious extremists isn't what they tell you it is and I'm afraid it isn't a battle we can win. I believe it's a battle that will, if we lose it, be the end of the American Dream.

It's tempting to think that the Christian supremacists, the evangelical horde are a fringe group that will be prevented by our firmly antiestblishmentarian constitution from ever being more than a nuisance or a local problem, but they are making gains, little by little and there is really no way to stop them. They are too well funded and we are too little educated.

It's easy to laugh at the idiotic attempts to squeeze references to the Ten Commandments into courthouses and for a lot of reasons. They really aren't part of Christianity and they command behavior that Christians assert they have been liberated from by their new covenant. Of course most of those commandments have nothing to do with civil law anyway and the three that do aren't unique to those commandments but rather descend from earlier Mesopotamian law codes. But we're talking about American tribalism here and none of that really matters. It's part of a much bigger strategy.

The myth of the Christian fathers and their quest to establish a Christian nation in the New World is of course a hoax and readers of Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Paine have a hard time crediting the sanity or honesty of the Christian Nation Crusaders, but those who would replace our constitution with a religious agenda as interpreted by a polyester priesthood of self proclaimed prophets have, quite literally, more money than God; enough money to make anything true. They have enough money to publish books carefully crafted from bits of redacted, illicitly inferred and blatantly confected fact that will prove to anyone willing to believe that old Tom Jefferson was a 21st century fundamentalist despite his well documented contempt for preachers, gospels, churches and the priests who buried the secular teachings of a secular morality teacher from Nazareth and twisted them into a false and freedom hating religion. Some day, said Tom, the divinity of Jesus would be as antique and unworthy of attention as the divinity of Isis or Jupiter. Religion itself was to be considered tyranny over the mind of man and its influence on government eternally to be opposed in our new land - so Christian was he.

"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly"

Sure it's easy, particularly if you produce a huge, impenetrable volume and your audience is not only wholly ignorant but gleefully gullible, to argue that Washington was a Christian when he wasn't, or that old evasively agnostic Franklin and hysterically anti-Christian Jefferson were too or that Madison's endless anti-Christian polemics mean that the constitution was intended to be interpreted as a Christian document for a Christian nation with an official Christian, gay bashing, Jew baiting, heathen hating, anti-abortion religion.

"Be afraid ACLU. Be very afraid. Morris packs The Christian Life and Character with page after page of original source material making the case that America was founded as a Christian nation. The evidence is unanswerable and irrefutable. This 1000-page book will astound you and send enemies of Christianity into shock."

Bearing false witness, of course, is the foundation of all preaching and the people who sent me an e-mail advertising two books designed for the Consternation of the ACLU and other devils are as false in this attempt as they are in their attempts to prove that science is just conjecture and conjecture is God's word, but it works and it is working and it will continue to work as we allow our country to be dumbed down, debased, mislead and proselytized into oblivion; the home of religious crazies led by madmen, crooks, liars tyrants and thieves where free thought makes one an "enemy of Christianity."

87.0736% extremist

New York Rep. Peter King thinks there are too many mosques in the US. I don't know whether that's true. I can only say that I've seen exactly one since I was old enough to know what a mosque was and I've been old enough for a long time. But Representative King is a Republican, a part of Guiliani's campaign and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and so has a personal financial interest in the marketing of hysteria and the promotion of irrational sectarian hatred.

85% of them, however many of them there might be, are controlled by extremist leadership, says Representative King. 85% -- although that number is probably there because it sounds like statistics but would be impossible to confirm or deny -- and besides, extremism is a relative and thus easily invoked term. Extremism can, according to traditional Republican values, be good: "no vice" as that icon of Republican virtue and multiple felon Spiro Agnew once told us. All in all, it's not a good argument, just one of the few left at the bottom of the barrel of bullshit.

Of course I think there are far too many Churches in the US and 87.0736% of them are extremist in that they are promoting the restriction of civil rights according to the teachings they invent for the purpose of undermining democracy and liberty and justice for all. They've succeeded in requiring our children to acknowledge their pantheon of bizarre deities and to swear that magic beings are involved in the government of the US. They have succeeded in replacing our coinage with little copper and paper religious engravings and they are constantly telling us what we can read, see, say and investigate; whom we can spend our lives with, how we can define our families, what we can teach our children about science and mathematics.

They not only promote wars and violence, they teach us that religious wars and violence are good when done in defense of an almighty dictator and are happy to provide all the fictitious history you could ever want to benefit their crusades and their war against science, math, physics, history, law, logic, cosmology, geology, paleontology, meteorology, statistics, probabilities and the origin of species through natural selection.

They promote the kind of mental illness that would allow, for instance, Mitt Romney, a follower of one Joseph Smith: demonstrable liar, forger and sexual pervert, to elevate his campaign to deny civil rights to people his sexually perverted and somewhat unclean looking prophet didn't like. It allows extremist followers of a Roman Bishop like Rudolph Guiliani to close a public museum for Blasphemy because he didn't think we should have the right to view a painting of a magic virgin who has babies with invisible gods that didn't adhere to the precise iconography of his church.

Too many Starbucks, too many SUV's and burger joints and way too Goddamn many churches.

Say it ain't so, Jesse

Jesse, Jesse, Jesse - you know I've always tried to like you and sometimes I've succeeded in admiring you and I've forgiven your "Hymie Town" slurs and the way your accent changes when you talk to different people, but you really haven't learned, have you?

So Obama is "acting like he's white" for not being "all over Jena." Are you accusing me of being a bigot like your friend Louis Farrakhan who threatens the Jews with destruction and thinks white people are devils? because that's what "Acting White" means in that context. I didn't accuse you of "acting black" when you accused the Jews of trying to defeat you while ignoring the large amount of support you've had from them. That's not fair and I know you're a man who has always tried to tell other people to be fair, unless of course you're referring to Jews or Hymies as you call them. That's not fair to Senator Obama either because if a man is going to be president of the United States and all its people, including Hymies and white people and others and commander of 30 thousand nuclear warheads and all, he's going to have to indulge in a bit of arrangement of things according to priority.

A good president simply isn't going to have time for and shouldn't have time for making the sad story of racial hysteria in a tiny town the center of his attention. That wouldn't mean he was "white" unless you consider responsibility to be an exclusively white trait and you don't, since you're not a racist of a kind who would talk down black people. I know that.

I'm quite sure you aren't promoting the idea that a president should intervene personally in judicial matters like the current administration and I'm sure you've heard Mr. Obama express his regrets at this unhappy situation that seems somehow headed for resolution without the Senator "being all over" it. So what is it really all about? do you really want to tell black people what they should or shouldn't; can or can't be because of their skin color?

I'm confused, I really am and although it could just be because I'm white, or worse yet - a hymie from hymietown, but maybe you could explain to me why Senator Obama isn't enough like you to be president.

Look the other way

It was a little bit of '68. It was a little bit of passion play. It was a taste of the police state and the sheep-like mental state of generation XBox, who sat there by the hundreds doing nothing but take pictures with their imported camera phones while a student had the crap beat out of him while held to the floor by a pile of University of Florida rent-a-cops who tasered and tasered and tasered him again while he screamed "let me go and I'll walk out of here."

What did he do? He ran longer than his allotted time - speaker John Kerry had given him permission to ask the final question and said it was a question worth answering. He was bubbly with enthusiasm - perhaps a little insensitive. What was the crime? Apparently it was not instant obedience to the goon squad trying to interfere with his right to free speech and peaceful assembly. Apparently he was too young to know it's the cops' country, not ours.

39 years ago Walter Cronkite told us "the whole world is watching" and they were. Today we're asking if anyone is watching, if anyone gives a damn what happens as long as their umbilical is still firmly attacked to the entertainment supply. Today I'm asking why those Nazi animals weren't confronted by thousands of angry students and forced to relinquish their prisoner. I'm asking why they're still in uniform.

Damn them and damn everyone who lets them get away with it.

Men in Black go back

Are we witnessing a new birth of testicularity in Iraq? It seems like Blackwater Security; the guys with the black helicopters and carte blanche to do as they will in Iraq are being kicked out by the Maliki government. The company that operates out of a secret and massive privately owned military base in North Carolina and charges enormous fees for shady operations free from any military code or oversight is accused of being involved in a Baghdad shootout that ended 8 lives.

The astonishing rise of Blackwater has been, in my opinion, one of the most frightening developments of the Bush administration. They rose from relative obscurity to being an enormous private army for hire after 9/11 - George Bush's private army paid for by the public, sometimes at a rate of over $100,000 per man as we saw when they were hired to police New Orleans. If we allow the free government of free Iraq to exercise a bit of freedom, the men in black may be back home for Christmas. What about your son or daughter, or father or cousin?

Fight to be free

Everybody's had to fight to be free
You see you don't have to live like a refugee

-Tom Petty

Jupiter Island, Florida is one of the wealthiest spots in the US but its exact status is difficult to determine since the people who live there are so low profile. I'm not sure there is a phone book. Residents include Old Money and political Old Money families and a few more recognizable folks like Tiger Woods and Celine Dion. There are no commercial establishments of any kind and the streets are lined with security cameras and cruising police cars. You would think it was the worst place in Florida at which to drop off illegal immigrants from Haiti and the Bahamas.

It is. A crew working on some umpteen million dollar house last Saturday observed a rickety boat and some people struggling in the water with a few coming ashore. Although someone in the water was calling for help, other boats were ignoring him.

"And at that point, we were going, 'All right, there has to be something wrong going on out here.' Because if it was a regular person, just yelling for help or something, somebody would have stopped for them" said one observer.

Apparently, black people are not regular people and under the circumstances can be presumed to be without papers. This is the churchgoing, Bible studying, God pledging south, but illegal is illegal so let the bastards drown even if the law requires you to lend assistance. It's happened before and US citizens have been left in the water to perish by bad Samaritans. A host of comments attached to the article in the paper today confirm the anti-immigrant sentiment with a degree of passion that would make Lou Dobbs blush.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker is chastising the Department of Homeland Security for dragging its feet as concerns the processing of some 10,000 Iraqis whose lives are now worth less than a Dinar since they assisted the US government and are approved by the UN for political refugee status.

There are at least 2 million homeless Iraqis who are victims of the ethnic cleansing that has allowed the government coyly to argue that sectarian violence is down. There are 2.2 million more who have fled to other countries that are bursting at the seams. 60,000 are fleeing their homes every month or being forced out and there is no place for them to go. We are willing to use these people to argue that we must stay there indefinitely to protect them, but we are not willing to take 10,000 of them in. There's no oil in it for us after all and besides, like Haitians and Bahamians and Mexicans, they're different than "regular" people.

Cross posted at The Impolitic

Florida justice

Maybe it isn't just the very rich that are different than you and I; the very Republican often can rely on a separate and not very equal justice. It seems that flirtatious Mark Foley won't be prosecuted for soliciting sex from a minor because there is a statute of limitations and he was able to run out the clock by invoking some prohibition against law enforcement being able to look at his computer even though it's owned and paid for by the taxpayers.

Ann Coulter may likewise scoot from under the felonious cloud she raised by voting in a precinct not her own and giving a false address when registering in Palm Beach Florida. Today's Palm Beach Post tells us

"The Florida Elections Commission investigation into whether populist conservative pundit Ann Coulter voted illegally in Palm Beach is expected to wind down in time for the commission's mid-November meeting. Complainant Richard Giorgio, a political consultant, just sent in additional paperwork on his testimony that he witnessed Coulter's vote in the wrong precinct in February 2006. .."

I have to admit I had dared to hope, but eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence against such as Coulter, with her friends in the FBI and the Republican Party make prosecuting her as difficult as prosecuting an 18 foot alligator in mating season. I'm sure she will slither away as easily and with the same contempt for the law as any scaled swamp thing. Perhaps the election commissioner should have called Animal Control in the first place.

Hostages, martyrs and liars

If William Randolph Hearst had had television, I'm sure it would have been necessary for the US to attack some crumbling empire less pathetic than Spain's. As it was, the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor was the 9/11 of its time that allowed the media and McKinley to contrive a reason to bring freedom and American values to Cuba and the Philippines and annex the country of Hawaii.

If Fox News and Freedoms Watch.org had been there, I'm sure they could have challenged France or Germany or England, if not all three. Hearst didn't have slick Ads using one-legged Judas goats to lead more people to martyrdom and he didn't have the families of the fallen to persuade us that to die a martyr for commercial interests and a president's ambition is sacred.


The lesson of the 1960's, for me, was that any war is sacred and once it's begun, reasons for its continuation will arise. Protest is bad because it decreases the morale of those being martyred for the cause that may not be questioned. Now as in the dear dead days of Vietnam, we have people who want to hold our democratic process and free speech hostage so that they can maintain the comforting illusion that their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers died for a noble cause. So it is that Merrillee Carlson, national chair of Families United for our Troops and Their Mission, went on Fox News to protest the use of the names of the dead in a protest against the continuation of the War for Oil.

"When somebody goes and abuses our son's courage and heroism by using it in this manner, it just strikes right to the heart and causes such pain that is unbelievable"

said she to Tucker Carlson. I'm sure her son had courage and he may or may not have been a hero; he may have thought George's oil grab really was a cosmic Manichaen struggle between Good and Evil, but my need to believe that and Merrillee's differ. Indeed if she believes he was abducted by aliens because it eases the pain, it is not America's problem nor is it America's duty to kill more and more and more so that she can sleep at night free from the suspicion that it was George W. Bush and his gang of Neocons who abused his courage and heroism, not the rest of us.

Tu est Petraeus

et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam

- with apology to Matthew 16:18

There are a lot of disgusting things going on in the world, but Rudy Guiliani hasn't made a fuss about them. He is however in full faux outrage mode at present and it's all about the lack of respect George Bush's pet General is getting for what seems to many to have been more of a pep talk than an open and honest assessment of conditions in Iraq. Petraeus may be an ass kisser, but the red marks on his backside are from Rudy's lipstick.

Certainly Rudy wouldn't be defending the GAO report if it were being inquired into by Hillary Clinton, but then the GAO isn't the hand chosen spokesman for wars and their indefinite continuation. About the most we can say for Petraeus and his report is that he may be right that Bush did not clear it beforehand, but he did choose Petraeus, reputation for sycophancy and all, in pretty much the same way he has chosen everyone in his circle. You swear on the bible and with lips on Bush's butt. He chose Petraeus because the barrel of reasons for the war is about empty and he had to have something apparently rock solid to build his church of war upon.

The notion that respect for generals should prevent scrutiny of their reports even when world stability, the economy and millions of lives are at stake, is reprehensible even for a grandstanding drag queen with delusions of grandeur like Rudy who seems far too often and much too conveniently to forget who works for whom. Evidence of the administration's respect for the American people has been harder to find than evidence for Saddam's chemical, nuclear and biological weapons facilities.

I never had any respect for Guiliani and any vestige of respect for Petraeus was substantially dried up when he pulled the malodorous cliche so many war lovers rely on: that we only have freedom of speech because soldiers gave it to us. It's a partial truth at best and partial truths are the worst kind of lies. Nobody is fighting to preserve the Bill of Rights in Iraq and few if any administrations have done more to weaken and nullify our civil rights than this one. By trying to make our long term occupation of an oil producing country; building airfields, bases, fortified embassies to facilitate making Iraq an economic subsidiary of the US and the international oil companies seem all about our civil liberties, Petraeus has indeed betrayed us and betrayed the people to whom we were supposed to be bringing freedom and independence. By playing along with the bomb-and-switch game of falsely identifying Iraq with al Qaeda and 9/11, he has betrayed us.

Would you buy a used war from this man?

Expect to hear a lot more about the MoveOn.org Petraeus/betray us ad in the New York Times. Expect never to hear the end of it. It's something that looks like it's got more legs than the photo of Jane Fonda on the Anti-aircraft gun. Somehow we're supposed to give him the kind of respect that asks no questions, looks at no prior performance and refrains from comparing his word to the words of others with less personal involvement. Somehow we're supposed to skulk away like a punished hound dog when blind respect for blind leaders and their sycophants is what got us involved in this mess in the first place. If past experience is any indication, we're going to be shown this ad as evidence that we "lost" the war in Iraq because of peaceniks and wimps called Bush's pet general a traitor. Our grandchildren will believe it. Our grandchildren will think it was a noble war for a noble cause and will refer to it while fighting to "Free" some other country.

The Mainstream parrots may stumble over their tongues trying to cast him in gilt bronze, but his superior officer, CENTCOM Chief, Admiral William Fallon, thinks he's an "ass kissing little chickenshit" and told him so to his face. It's going to be hard to smear Fallon with the usual slime however; he may have more than enough firepower of his own to blow any swift boats out of the water, so the media will no doubt do what it does - ignore him while parading their painted soldier.